The organizing and performing work for a single user on a computer system is widely implemented. Generally, software tools are created to allow a single user to perform tasks and generate content within specific applications. The context of one application typically does not lend perfectly to the content of another application. The ability to perform a long-running process that cuts across multiple applications is generally limited to the user performing ad hoc processes and interacting with multiple applications in sequence. Similar limitations exist on collaboration for performing such work or accomplishing particular objectives.
Both collaboration and individual work on goal-oriented tasks that involve resources of different data types and/or resources sourced from different applications, today generally require separate development by individual users followed by manual integration of content. Users can create “To Do” lists, post calendars, and generate content, but none of the current offerings allow the leveraging of server system (e.g., enterprise system) resources to accomplish the objective in the way that might be provided for business processes, for example. Some collaboration is computer-assisted, such as through the use of editing tools, but typically requires the sending of original copies of documents back and forth for the integration phase.
The advent of social network is trying to connect people in computer system and virtual spaces in a similar way that people are accustomed to interacting in the real world. However, the usefulness of social networking is typically communicative, rather than having any focus or functionality from the perspective of getting work done. Social networks allow interaction and contribution by means of a hosted software solution. Current drawbacks of the so-called “Web 2.0” that incorporates the concepts of social networking include the fact that the systems currently in place are not well suited for corporate knowledge management, such as communities of best practice sharing their work practices, user communities sharing their knowledge about an internal tool, and communities of interest collectively contributing to a topic. While such interactions may be accomplished in an informal, communicative way with current social networking, such interactions do not integrate into the enterprise, or allow management, access, and monitoring by the enterprise systems.
The concepts of “Web 2.0” also include the paradigm of a world of users that share self-published content over the Internet. Thus, an everyday user turns into an active content publisher by using simplified versions of web publishing tools to create their own web content, e.g., Facebook photo albums or Wiki pages. While such a paradigm appears to leverage the power of the entire human population to externalize and manifest knowledge to be accessed and consumed by others, mere publishing has resulted in an explosion of content that is not necessarily accessible and usable, especially in accomplishing work within an enterprise. The tools are not in place to leverage the generation of content to get work done.
Task management is a well known concept in various software products spanning from core ERP (enterprise resource planning) to modern personal productivity tools. However, similar to the current limits of social interaction systems as described above, current products fall short in supporting the actual work practice of users, whether alone or in groups. For example, in personal productivity tools (e.g., word processing, spreadsheets, etc.) the concept of tasks is limited to the simplified concept of a text descriptor and properties like owner, due date, and importance. The task object is not meant to include the actual work but is simply a reminder or meta object to plan work. Consequently, the actual work is done disconnected from any system support. Furthermore, coordination of the work among others is difficult or impossible to achieve and even more difficult to monitor within the system.
Currently there exist collaboration tools, which rely on the principle of sharing information. However, such tools are historically disconnected from productivity tools and ERP software applications. The result is that collaboration tools are limited in scope of functionality to publishing content in a way that it can be coordinated by user action. However, again, the actual coordination of contents and/or people, and work are separate contexts. Synchronous sharing of information is typically limited to a few specialized products, mostly application sharing or virtual meeting tools. Asynchronous sharing tools like collaboration rooms (e.g., GROOVE) or shared info site (e.g., SHAREPOINT) are until today stand-alone tools and not extensions of the origin of collaboration. Users only make use of them for collaboration with poor integration of their personal task context. It will be understood that all trademarks used herein are the sole property of their respective owners, and are used herein only for purposes of identification.
ERP workflow tasks come with business information and simple response or data entry options. In most cases, users collaborate and process information outside of the workflow system and act beyond any modeled processes. Thus, most of the actual work practice is hidden and unmanaged, and cannot leverage the tools of the ERP system. Workflow is typically modeled as flow or state transitions and assumes that the system has sufficient knowledge to compute the state transitions. Systems attempting to control flow fall short when trying to support unstructured information work in complex business situations, which by definition involve problems and tasks understood by the users but not by the system.
Besides the lack of supporting the actual work, none of the above task management solutions provide sufficient support for people-centric work orchestration. ERP workflow is mediated by the system and pushes tasks to users without taking into consideration how people request work from each other in real life. Requesting work typically involves speech-acts like request, accept, promise, clarify, request, or declare between the person who is asking for work (requester), and the person who is committing to work (performer). Traditional workflow design typically ignores this human-to-human relationship and reduces it to rudimentary concepts like task ownership and simple delegation as part of task management.
Between system-enforced orchestration and personal task management, there is a wide gap of true collective collaboration, in which people work together on the same artifacts or the same context.
Due to the effort of setting up and administrating such workspaces, such spaces have been used for either departmental information spaces or for collaborative project work with critical importance and long lifetime. Newer, more flexible tools, such as hosted spaces like Google Groups allow quicker creation and simpler content authoring. However, such spaces do not integrate into business process management or consume or integrate business content, and so they fail to be enterprise ready. None of the current systems provides a useful environment for a single user to perform work that may or may not be shared with others.
Furthermore, the principle of authoring content and collaborating to generate content is currently focused on the assembling of web pages. Typical methods involve users selecting from a repository of available UI (user interface) parts, which they then lay out in the page in a way that makes sense for them. Consequently, the authoring depends on the existence of such UI parts and the suitability for re-use of such parts. Such an approach raises serious scalability issues and questions the ability to support information work which is not predictable. In general, current tools lack integration of business content, and raise security concerns, both of which limit current applicability to unstructured content, rather than structured business content.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as discussing other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein. An overview of embodiments of the invention is provided below, followed by a more detailed description with reference to the drawings.